There is no getting around the simple fact that this is an album which shouldn't have come out.

These are songs which were never finished by Michael Jackson before his death in 2009, never scheduled for release during the decade or two beforehand when they had been written and partially recorded, and now songs which have been remodelled, to varying degrees, by new "executive producers".

This is by no means the travesty that was the ''album'' called Michael, also of unreleased/unfinished songs and released in the immediate wake of his death, that was so slapdash and marred with controversy (his family even claimed that it wasn't Jackson's voice on some of the tracks) that even the devotees struggled to find solace in it after they bought it in their millions.

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But nonetheless, it is hardly being provocative to say of the songs on Xscape, which were begun between 1983 and 1999, that if Michael Jackson had wanted them out, they would have come out.

If you buy the deluxe version you will get the eight regular songs, then pre-contemporary enhancement versions of those songs plus a third take on Love Never Felt So Good, a "duet" with Justin Timberlake.

It's fair to say Timberlake's contribution is pretty superfluous or a waste of his talent (take your generational pick) as he barely figures.

That song, Love Never Felt So Good – co-written with the unlikely figure of Paul Anka shortly after Thriller was released in 1982 – begins the album proper and is both one of the best moments here and also fairly indicative of one of the sustained threads throughout: a sense of connection, or searching for connection, with what you might call the golden period of Jackson's career, between 1979's Off The Wall and 1987's Bad.

It has a mid-tempo dance feel which recalls the late '70s, strings and piano and little squeals in the background that had already become Jackson staples.

It's not necessarily lack of ideas that hold things back. 1991's Slave To The Rhythm (which features some cool synth sounds and an electro heart) and 1998's Blue Gangsta are busy tracks but that busyness only partially camouflages the truth that both are pretty slight songs.

Interest inevitably will fall on Do You Know Where Your Children Are?, and not really for the harder edge to its R&B. The song's storyline, about a girl sexually abused by her stepfather, seduced by the prospect of Hollywood and then sexually abused as a streetwalker on Sunset Boulevard – all by the age of 12 – isn't going to escape the accusations of molestation thrown at Jackson.

You'd have to wonder if someone at the time told him this wasn't the best idea to be putting out there. And if someone now shouldn't have said the same thing.

But then what Michael Jackson wanted is a matter of dispute with this album anyway.